If you want a book that is genuinely going to make you smile this summer, then you could do a lot worse than purchasing or borrowing The Overdue Life of Amy Byler by Kelly Harms. It’s a total enjoyment fest! I had never heard of Kelly Harms, but by chance came across her whilst on […]
The Cost of Living is my first Deborah Levy book, but I have questions for those of you who have had the good fortune to read others. Are they all this good? Do you always need to read them with a pen and piece of paper at your side to jot down beautiful quotes? Is […]
Living in northern California, close to San Francisco, I seldom have reason to ever really consider what life in Los Angeles must be like. In the last ten years, beyond the amusement parks that litter the LA suburbs, I’ve never had reason or need to visit. As a backpacking European in the 1990s, a friend […]
There are some books that you simply live as you read, part wishing that this life could be yours. Paris By The Book by Liam Callanan is one of them. Callanan tells the story of Leah, a mother of two girls, living in Milwaukee and married to novelist, Robert Eady. Robert has a good deal […]
Many years ago, when Child Number One was very small and I still lived in London, my dear friend Ms S and I used to frequent any number of playgrounds to occupy our children and to fill our days. This was in an era long before the iPhone became ubiquitous, when it was still possible […]
For a while I have been feeling a little restless, wanting to read something that’s different from the books that I normally choose. It’s hard to break out from patterns of your own making, but I really wanted to. I’d seen Adele in my local bookstore a few times and although it matched such criteria, […]
As I read Where the Crawdads Sing, one thought kept going around and around in my mind: what must this novel have done for North Carolina tourism? Honestly, if the The Husband wasn’t such a slave to the office and the kids weren’t constrained by the restrictions of school, I think that I would be […]
Whatever weekend plans you have, cancel them. I’m serious. They simply cannot be better than sitting down and giving a day to Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J.Firky. I absolutely adored this novel, in fact along with Victor Lavalle’s The Changeling, which is a very different kind of book altogether, it’s my favorite book […]
There is always a special place in life for the books that surprise you, taking you somewhere utterly different to where you had assumed you were going. The Changeling by Victor Lavalle is one such novel and in my mind, it’s a masterpiece, which is not a term I use lightly. This novel languished on […]
I at once loved Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill and had to acknowledge that I had never read anything quite like it. It’s so beautiful and well done that frankly it has rendered me bereft of words to describe it. To tell you what this story is about, hardly seems to do it justice […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 